IntroductionDear developers and other employees of Bioware, Lucas Arts, Disney and Electronic Arts!

A large part of the player base can't enjoy the game properly because of the lack of chat bubbles (aka speech bubbles). Therefore, on behalf of the affected players, we are hereby suggesting and formally requesting an option to toggle chat bubbles for spatial chat (/say, /yell, /emote).
This thread has started in beta shortly after chat bubbles were removed from the game for "optimization", reposted after the forum wipe and has now run an incredibly long amount of time while still remaining constructive and has garnered a lot of support ever since.

Fact is, chat bubbles make a big difference in the perception of human presence around the player in the game. With chat bubbles the chat text is strongly associated with the likeness of the player's character that you're talking to, leading to a much richer (and more natural) form of social environment. The game world simply feels too sterile and lonely without them.
One could say that chat bubbles are for the roleplaying and social aspects of the game what the group finder is for the PVE aspect and the warzone queing and the galactic starfigther hangar interfaces are for the PVP aspect. These three have been implemented a long time ago, yet players of the social and roleplaying aspects have never received their equivalent - speech/chat bubbles.

A large part of the player base, and an even larger part of the potential player base (and the player base that left the game because the feature has been missing so long and wish to return once it's implemented) needs an option to toggle on chat bubbles. Indeed, chat bubbles are a "must-have" feature to be able to enjoy the game and their playstyle for many of the socializers, roleplayers, casual players as well as players suffering from certain medical conditions out there. People are leaving the game every day due to this feature missing. On the bright side, many have voiced interest to return once the feature is implemented...but the longer it takes, the easier it will be to loose them permanently.

Even simple chat bubbles or overhead text for /say, /yell and /emote chat would go a long way:

Bare Minimum Implementation
The following is the Bare Minimum Implementation that a large part of the player base feels to be a must-have and most would feel comfortable with:

Add chat bubbles (or, at the very, very least overhead chat text) with all the typed text in /say, /yell and /emote chat channels to appear above the head of the player characters that are saying it (above the head of other player characters as well as your own), in addition to the same text being displayed in the chat window.

Add a client-side option to toggle chat bubbles on/off on each computer individually so people can choose whether they wish to see chat bubbles above player characters' heads or not.

Additional Community Suggestions

The following are additional suggestions by players in this thread which would improve the experience even more and could be added after the bare minimum implementation detailed above has made it into the game. They are some of the ideas the community has come up with on how to design and implement chat bubbles really well (click on the button labeled SHOW below to view).

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Add chat bubbles for /say, /yell and /emote chat that display whatever is said in these chat channels in it's entirety in addition to the chat window over the head of the player character that is saying it (both over your own as well as characters around yours).

Have chat bubbles preferably enabled by default.

Add a client-side option to toggle chat bubbles on/off for any text players type in /say, /yell and /emote chat to Preferences->Chat.
This allows every player to decide for themselves whether they would like to see chat bubbles or not for whatever reason. Possibly give us an option to turn chat bubbles on/off for each chat channel individually and expand the choices to /party and /ops chat.

Add talking animations that triggers when typing into /say and /yell to visualize that the character is currently talking or shouting.
Existing character animations may be reused for this, like the one used by your companions when you click on them and they start talking and moving their lips.

Lower the range of /say to 25 meters (currently 40 meters) and keep the range of /yell at 50 meters.
This has proven a good range for spatial chat in other MMOs to prevent clutter.

Add a slider to allow people to freely and individually adjust the amount of chat bubbles that can be on the screen at any given time from 0 to a maximum number of whatever the maximum for the engine/datatype may be.
This will allow players to adjust the amount of chat bubbles, clutter and performance for their individual taste and computer.

Add a slider to allow people to freely and individually adjust the range at which chat bubbles disappear from maximum range for each chat channel (25 meters for /say, 50 meters for /yell, 50 meters for /emote) down to a minimum value of couple of meters (10 meters?).
This will allow players to find a good compromise between the amount of chat bubbles on the screen, clutter and performance for their individual taste and computer.

Add a slider to adjust the duration of how long chat bubbles remain on the screen in seconds with a gracious maximum value.
This will allow players of all ages to freely adjust the duration of chat bubbles remaining on their screen according to their own preferences and reading speed.

Give us the option to freely adjust the font size in chat bubbles and whether the size scales with distance or not.

Chat Bubbles should remain visible while the chat window is toggled off in order to allow people to choose to rely solely on chat bubbles and not on the chat window if they decide to do so.

Chat bubbles for each chat channel/type should have a different appearance styleTake a look how other MMORPGs like Star Wars Galaxies implemented chat bubbles (click to see a screenshot) (SWG still has one of the best implementations of chat bubbles in MMORPGs to date). Note how different chat bubbles styles distinguish between the various chat channels.
Chat bubbles could also be sporting the same hue/color (be it border or background, depends on the style you choose) each chat channel is assigned to in the chat window of your client.

Change the /emote and /yell chat channels to be visible to the opposing faction, just like the /say chat channel is now.
There is no reason to block /emote and /yell (or even /tell and /whisper for that matter), as opposing factions can communicate via /say already anyway (and there is an /ignore feature for bad things, after all). Blocking those just limits cross-faction socializing between player and cross faction roleplay.

Add a separate option to show/hide chat bubbles (or just chat in general) from opposing faction players (be it in warzones only or globally).

Reasons: Why Chat bubbles?
The following is a short summary of the reasons why chat bubbles should be implemented.

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Chat Bubbles strongly associate the chat text with the likeness of the player character that you're talking to, leading to a much richer, more natural and more immersive form of social environment.

Chat Bubbles make a big (positive) difference in the perception of human presence in the game.

Chat Bubbles are for Roleplayers and Socializers what the group finder is for PVEers and the warzone queueing interface is for PVPers. They allow people to find roleplay and social play around them and more easily focus on it.

Chat bubbles encourage face to face interactions with other players.

They encourage multiplay instead of solo-play - most desirable in a MMOG.

Chat bubbles improve communication and group/Ops group coordination between players.

They are an essential tool for building and strengthening the community, which is the main reason that keeps people playing and stay loyal to a MMO(RP)G for many years and even decades, even when the PVE and PVP content may have run it's course.

Without chat bubbles, many players "feel all alone" in the game (the chat window feels very detached from the game).

They allow people to focus on the world in front of them, and not a tiny chat window in a corner or anywhere else but near the center of the screen.

The fast scrolling chat window is impossible to follow conversations while in an area with a large amount of people.

The game world seems to be a lot less sterile and more alive when you can actually see player characters talking.

Making new chat channels is not a useful alternative.

People with various visual impairments/disabilities rely on chat bubbles in MMORPGs to even be able to effectively communicate and play with other players at all.
The same is true for many older gamers.

Without chat bubbles, roleplay and socializing is nearly impossible especially in crowded areas, it's tedious and simply is not fun - especially in areas where there are many people or during questing and other parts of the game.

Chat bubbles help to pinpoint and find people that are talking in spatial chat in large and crowded areas.

Chat bubbles aren't only for Roleplayers - they provide benefits for a great many players with all kinds of playstyles - be it socializers, roleplayers, Group/Flashpoint/Operations PVE players and PVP combatants (that don't rely on voice chat), community builders among others.

A large amount of the player base want chat bubbles as an option. Bioware said they are implementing player's wishes - this is a top priority wish/issue for a large part of the player base.

Chat bubbles or at least overhead chat text have been a standard feature in almost every mainstream, premium priced MMO released during the past decade that a whole lot of players are used to. There also hasn't been anything invented that's remotely capable of fully replacing chat bubbles for communication between players in MMO(RP)Gs yet (text to speech technology combined with positional audio is still far off from sounding natural). If such a basic feature is missing, many players won't even consider playing a new MMOG.

People have started to cancel their subscriptions due to the lack of chat bubbles and missing official assurance by Bioware that they are being implemented soon.

/say and /yell chat channels are practically useless without chat bubbles. They are like /general with lower range.

Having a client side option to freely turn chat bubbles on or off to each player's liking will allow every player to enjoy the game, whether they need chat bubbles or not.
Everyone has fun, everyone is happy, everyone wins!

Related Links
The following are hyperlinks related to the topic of chat bubbles (click on the button labeled SHOW below to view).

UI Feature Feedback Request
Bioware asks to post UI Feedback and suggestions in this thread. Head over to the official UI Feature Feedback Request thread and request chat bubbles to be implemented as the next UI feature!

Official The Old Republic Twitter
If you're on Twitter, go to Bioware's Official TOR Twitter account and regularly tweet questions about chat bubbles and an ETA on them! Include the hashtags #swtorchatbubbles and #swtor in your tweets and tweet them often about it until we finally get some concrete information and ETA on chat bubbles! Feel free to use these hashtags together in tweets to your friends as well!

Media Articles about the lack of Chat bubbles
The following are articles from various media on the topic of missing chat bubbles in Star Wars: The Old Republic (click on the button labeled SHOW below to view).

Timeline of Official statements by Bioware on the topic of Chat Bubbles
Would you like to know what exactly the developers and other Bioware representatives said about chat bubbles? This is the place (click on the button labeled SHOW below to view)!
The following is a timeline with quotes from various official non-beta statements of TOR developers and other Bioware representatives on the topic of chat bubbles including links to the statements where available (click on the button labeled SHOW below to view).

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November 2011:Fan Site Summit: Day 1 -- Q&A with James Ohlen, Fan Site Summit 2 Q&A Wrap-Up
Articles about the Fansite Summits from November 2011, where Bioware's Studio creative director James Ohlen promised chat bubbles to be a "high priority in BioWare's list of things to do". On a side note, Principal Lead Combat Designer Georg Zoeller confirmed this on the beta forums as well by posting "chat bubbles are a high-priority feature for launch or shortly thereafter" around the same timeframe.

January 20th, 2012:Re: Sprechblasen!!
The Old Republic's German Community Manager Ursula Brand wrote the following in reply to a German thread about chat bubbles.
English Translation: "We have definitely forwarded your wish. But you can certainly understand that it isn't of high priority at the moment. Hence I sadly can't tell you anything about it at this time, whether chat bubbles are coming or not (much less when they are coming). I myself have colored my chat channels in different (partially very bright) colors. This helps me keep the overview. But yes it's really hard at large RP-events when the chat is speeding to no end..."
Original German text:"Wir haben euren Wunsch auf alle Fälle weitergegeben. Aber ihr könnt sicher verstehen, dass das im Moment keine hohe Priorität hat. Insofern kann ich euch leider zu diesem Zeitpunkt nichts dazu sagen, ob Sprechblasen kommen werden (geschweige denn wann). Ich persönlich habe alle meine Chat-Channels in verschiedenen (teilweise ziemlich grellen Farben) eingefärbt. Das hilft mir sehr, die Übersicht zu bewahren. Aber ja, bei großen RP-Events, wenn der Chat rast ohne Ende, dann wird es wirklich schwer ..."

January 26th, 2012:Interview: BioWare’s Cory Butler and the Future of Star Wars: The Old Republic
An interview with Bioware's Cory Butler from January 2012 which has the first official mention of chat bubbles since James Ohlen talking about them at the Fansite Summit and Georg Zöller confirming it on the beta forums in November 2011.
When asked about chat bubbles in the interview, Butler awkwardly avoids the topic by simply saying "I can’t really go into the specifics about chat bubbles just yet.".

February 17th, 2012:Community Q&A: Feb 17th 2012
in the February 17th 2012 Community Q&A post, Bioware's Damion Schubert confirmed that chat bubbles will be implemented: "They're definitely on the list. We’ve got many active roleplayers in the dev team and chat bubbles have always been important to us. We actually had chat bubbles in beta, but there was unfortunately some serious performance issues that our implementation caused that, for example, made things really suck in warzones and the fleet. They’ll be coming soon, but in priority, the GUI team is focused first on GUI customization. I'll have a better idea of timing once we get past that. And yes, for people who hate them, whenever we do them, they'll be toggleable."

March 5th 2012:STAR WARS: The Old Republic - Guild Summit 2012 Roleplaying Panel
Bioware's new Lead Designer Daniel Erickson confirmed on the topic "The future of roleplaying" that chat bubbles are indeed coming and issues with chat bubbles having a negative effect on performance have been resolved: "Chat bubbles...yeah, chat bubbles. *bows his head in shame while applause roars through the room* So...this is...this is one of those weird...like... *sigh* ... there are things that you can always tell from our faces when we talk about it. There are things that are just kind of embarassing. Like we had chat bubbles in the game and for whatever reason there was a really strange technical... thing... with the chat bubbles that they totally dragged the performance of the game down. [takes a deep breath] We were like "chat bubbles...really? That's what's doing it?!" And you know, a tech came over and turned off the chat bubbles and framerate went way up and we were like "Oh god, okay." So...uh. We think we've got that worked out though. So chat bubbles: YES!"

June 29th, 2012:Community Q&A: June 29th 2012
When answering a question about how much of the development is based on the developers' ideas and how much is based on Community input, Bioware's Lead Designer Daniel Erickson acknowledged chat bubbles as one of the most requested community features although they didn't see them as a "big must-have feature" and confirmed that they will be added to the game in the near future (although he didn't give any details on when that will be): "As we come to the end of our big must-have features (like Group Finder), updates are driven more and more by the community. Expect to see far more of the smaller quality of life requested features (color matching for companions, chat bubbles, etc.) start to get real traction under them in the near future."

November 28th, 2012:SWTOR Patch 1.6 Livestream Q&A
TOR Lead Designer Damion Schubert and Executive Producer Jeff Hickman mentioned chat bubbles in the SWTOR Patch 1.6 Livestream Q&A approximately 20 Minutes and 54 seconds into the video: "Earlier this year we had the guild summit. Guild capital ships, Guild calenders, Guild progression, chat bubbles, ability to sit in chairs, ready chat, and chat channel customizations were mentioned. When is this coming?"Jeff:"From my standpoint, these are all great things. I want to be frank with everybody as I can. The studio has undergone a lot of change since those conversations. You can see, we are busy working on a lot of things. We havn’t stepped back on what we are working on but we changed some of the things that we are working on. While some of these things and some of these things are still on the list to happen in the future. Some of them are backburner list. I just don’t want anybody to think we have forgotten about them but I also don’t want people to think they are coming next week. Those are things that have being pushed out quite abit due to the studio changes. I love the idea of Capital ships and that is a big pet project of yours (Damion). I just want to make sure that everybody knows that these things a bit further out.Damion: At the guild summit I introduced everybody to the wall of crazy, which is a big list of features that we have on the wall that we want to do. All the features are on the list but it is a prioritized list that is competing with the things the game needs, things we had to do to get the F2P stuff happen, things that the content guys need in order to make content more reliable. The smaller things on that list have a much greater chance to happen sooner – every now and then programmers have a bit free time and you can hand them stuff like that. As an example there, inventory sorting that is coming soon. I had a programmer that had a day and that was the thing at the top of the list that fit in the bucket of time we had."

December 5th, 2012:Re: Chat Bubbles: We need an option to enable them for say, yell and emote chat!
TOR's Senior Community Coordinator Allison Berryman talked to lead Designer Damion Schubert and posted the following feedback from him: "Hey everyone - I asked Lead Designer Damion Schubert if there are any new updates on this topic. We still do not have an ETA for the implementation of this feature, but we're definitely aware it's something players want. We did attempt a version of chat bubbles once, but they introduced some severe performance issues, and we'll need to address that before they can be implemented. Thanks for your patience!"

January 18th, 2013: Re: Want to Test RotHC (and live in Austin)?
TOR UI programmer Cory Kolek was kind enough to post an update on why chat bubbles haven't been implemented so far and told us that they would still like to implement them: "I don't have much else to say on the topic than what was already said in that thread. I can get a bit more technical on the topic though. As it was said before chat bubbles were a huge performance hit on the game when we had initially implemented them in beta. We're talking upwards of 400Mbs of video memory used on chat bubbles alone. Nameplates had the same issue. We fixed nameplates but have not had time to do the same with chat bubbles. If you played in beta and saw our initial implementation of them they weren't very pretty or as fully featured as we'd like them to be. So, yes, we would like to implement them again, but when we do we want to do it right."

March 25th, 2013: Developer Q&A: Featuring Bruce Maclean
In a Developer Q&A with DarthHater.com, the Lead Designer for Rise of the Hutt Cartel Bruce Maclean was asked about chat bubbles and other things roleplayers want, but dodged the topic of the former once more: DarthHater:"Many players that are interested in Role Playing are curious about the following features: Chat Bubbles, the ability to sit on all forms of furniture, being able to enter their own backstory prior to the start of their class story (in the form of a paragraph that could be read upon inspection), or just updates in general that will support the ability to Role Play."Bruce Maclean:"We’re always looking to add things that enhance and support roleplaying, but we have to weigh the impact some of these new features might have on performance or other quality-of-life improvements. There may be room for us to create specific social spaces with sittable furniture, for example, but converting all furniture in the game would be a monumental task."

October 13th, 2013: New York City Community Cantina Tour 2013 Q&AAt the NYC Cantina Tour Q&A, the developers were asked about chat bubbles by fellow community member SawneyRath and replied that "Chat Bubbles are indeed being worked on", and they "Want to offer them even better than before". In addition, they stated "We have a prioritized list of features we want to add in the game. Chat Bubbles are relatively high up on that list.".

October 19th, 2013: NSWTOR: NYC Cantina Tour Q&A Update!Damion Schubert had the following to say when asked about chat bubbles: "They are on the list." Schubert continued to say that they are not soon, but they are on there somewhere. "We have some nice big juicy things that are better that are on the list after space. I wish I could say more, but I can't."

Original Post from the Beta ForumsA quote of the old, prose version of the original post that started it all and was first posted in the TOR Beta Forums back in Summer 2011 for those that like to read it (click on the button labeled SHOW below to view).

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Quote:
Originally Posted by Glzmo

Greetings, Bioware developers working on Star Wars: The Old Republic!

We really, really need a client-side option to enable chat bubbles for /say and possibly /yell and /emote chat to appear above character's heads and display the text that they type into those chat channels.

Socializing, roleplaying and even multiplayer combat, both PVE and PVP with other players is incredibly tedious without them.
Many people prefer to have their eyes on the action, which means they miss the chat around them when they focus on the action. Some choose to focus on the chat and miss the action entirely - forget to heal their mates, etc..

Also, it ruins immersion to not see which character on the screen says what at any given time.

That's why we need an option to turn on chat bubbles (speech bubbles). Make it an optional toggle on/off option so every user can decide for themselves if they want chat bubbles to show on their client or not.

There are some visually impaired people that would thank you for chat bubbles as well.

Also, if there are indeed performance issues with the speech bubbles still (reportedly, that's why Bioware removed them during beta), a toggle option will give the users a chance to either sacrifice performance for playability and turn the chat bubbles on or turn them off and gain some performance.

Everybody wins! So please, developers, I beg you dearly to add chat bubbles already, they are an essential part of MMOs for many players. Thank you very much!

PS.: It may be wise to limit the range of /say chat to 25 meters and keep /yell at 50 meters while at it to minimize clutter.

PPS.: While at it, please add some speaking animations when saying something in chat to complement chat bubbles as well (there is a nice animation bount to the /talk emote already, perhaps you wish to use that one).

PS.:The development team will receive cupcakes once chat bubbles are in the game. The longer they wait, the older the cupcakes get. So hurry up, it's for your own good!